Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

The document proposes an outline for a synodal theology of the laity considering the historical-theological journey of the laity in Latin America after Vatican II and the current synodal process. The document is divided into three sections. The first explores the historical-theological balance of the role of the laity. The second section analyzes the experience of the synodal process up to the Continental Stage of the Synod. The third section proposes an outline of a synodal theology of the laity considering the two previous sections. In this way, the document will shed light on the following questions: how could the laity face the current threats to common life in the continent (criminality, inequality, etc.) from a renewed perspective of commitment to the world? How could the laity show/be an image of the Church as a community of hope and an icon of the coming Kingdom in Latin America?

The paper examines how Pope Francis uses synodality to promote the reception of Vatican II while considering the challenges posed by globalization and cultural diversity, especially but not exclusively at the European continental level. This is especially relevant because the 2023 Instrumentum Laboris focuses on the Church’s engagement with Western and other cultures while trying to avoid (neo)colonial tendencies. This inspires two approaches: the first path emphasizes cultural interactions within synodal processes, while the other scrutinizes the particularity and tensions of cultural identities. Following this second line, the paper critiques the continental dimension of synodal processes, warning against the essentialization of cultural narratives. By exploring tensions within European culture and drawing parallels with (past) synodal experiences, I aim to unravel ecclesiological implications. Finally, I conclude by proposing lessons learned from the European continental phase to improve future synodal efforts, mindful of the hope, tensions, and hurt generated by it.

My paper critically evaluates many of the volumes on Synodality coming out of Europe and North America. I use as test-case for European thinking on Synodality, the articles that appear in the Gregorianum and Louvain Studies. I use as test-case for North American thinking on Synodality, the writings on the subject by the US theologians Gaillardetz. Bradford Hinze, and Massimo Faggioli. All three thinkers speak glowingly of the synodal vision of Pope Francis, which they also uphold as transformative of Christian ecclesial life. But they also recognize some limitations. Thus, while my essay acknowledges the ferment in Synodality-discourse as presently constituted, it also uses postcolonial optic to question whether the supreme power of the Church—legislative, administrative, judicial, and supervisory—resides only in the west. My conclusion is that for the Church to achieve a “noncompetitive theology of church,” that quest must begin with and be rooted in ecclesiastical decolonization.

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In my presentation, I argue that ancestors as “spectral beings” present a challenge for Euro-American scholars. Ancestors play a powerful role in many cultures, and yet due to various forms of secularism, Euro-American scholars tend to discount the role of ancestors—including in their own Euro-American cultures. My window into this large topic is North American Indigenous cultures in the context of settler colonialism. After making broad comments about the role of past and future ancestors in North American Indigenous cultures, giving special attention to the work of Kyle Whyte of the Potawatomi Nation, I focus on the work of Leslie Marmon Silko. Ancestors are prominent characters in Silko’s writings: they are a tangible, practical part of life. Finally, I argue that, when viewed from the perspective of Silko’s Indigenous extraordinary beings, we gain a new sense of “spectral” ancestors in Euro-American cultures and traditions.

This paper offers a contemporary examination of the East Asian practice of ancestral worship, with a focus on its evolution since the historical Chinese Rites Controversy. Emphasizing key themes such as ancestral veneration, Confucian rites, Catholic and Protestant reactions, contemporary practices, harmonization, and complimentary or conflicting religious dynamics, the study delves into the multifaceted nature of ancestral worship in modern East Asian societies. Drawing on observations of evolving rituals and beliefs, the paper explores how ancestral worship has adapted to globalization, modernization, and cultural shifts while retaining its cultural significance in shaping family and community dynamics. It examines the interplay between ancestral veneration and various Asian religious traditions, including Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity, highlighting efforts towards syncretism or tension between different belief systems. Furthermore, the paper analyzes contemporary challenges faced by practitioners of ancestral worship, such as generational shifts and urbanization. It explores how these challenges impact the preservation and transmission of ancestral rituals. It also considers the global dimension of ancestral worship among East Asian diaspora communities, examining how these rituals are maintained and adapted in multicultural contexts.

Can modern philosophers of religion take ancestor regard seriously? How might ancestor regard make a decisive and defensible contribution to the interpretation of life? This paper seeks to clarify the “ancestor” field of religious reference and proposes a new framing of its ideal significance. On the model of “life is a conference” (complementary to Knepper’s “life is a journey”), ancestors figure as stakeholders in shared life whose supposed presence in our councils distinctively activates ethical, historical, and religious forms of responsibility: ethical in occupying the role of Ideal Observers, historical in anchoring long-term group endeavors, and religious in representing ideal human relations with ultimate reality and value. The combination of these activations is a sweet spot for ambitious moral reflection. The principle of responsibility prompting makes normative sense of ancestor regard without depending on unconvincing and culturally less regulated speculation about souls or deities.

A mid-twentieth century burst of church planting missionary activity in the Diocese of New Jersey aimed at catering to the massive suburban growth in the state. During his period of “white flight,” white families fled urban areas and settled in racially restricted suburban developments in order to avoid proximity to Black neighbors. The Diocese of New Jersey fully cooperated with this pattern of development, funding and building new churches in suburban areas with racially restrictive covenants. The result today is a functionally segregated diocese, with most Black churches located in areas of systemic neglect, and most White churches located in areas that have been comparatively prosperous and fully supported with infrastructure and services. Long diocesan cooperation with the prevailing systemic racism that produced the current, functionally segregated state of New Jersey, has produced ecclesiological segregation and perennial underfunded Black churches and ministries.

In this paper I will reiterate earlier work where I showed that African women members of the Mothers’ Union (MU) in South Africa forged a neo-indigenous expression of Christianity during the first half of the 20th century. The paper will show that these women had to resist the restrictions placed on them by women missionaries and church leadership from England with respect to their church uniforms that had been adapted from manyano groups (women's prayer groups) of other church denominations. In the modern post-colonial post-apartheid church context, the church uniform carries with it certain ambiguities and these will be explored through interviews with African women clergy, professional middle-class lay women, and the leadership of the MU. This case study will show that African Anglican women in South Africa have forged a particular expression of Anglican identity that, despite being shaped by post-colonial modernity and globalization, is unique.

It is crucial to consider the perspectives of people in the pews—active lay Anglicans—to understand the operative ecclesiologies and lived missiologies present in the Anglican Communion today. Analysis of focus groups conducted with over four hundred lay people in the Anglican Diocese of Toronto reveals a dominant operative ecclesiology focused on the survival of individual local parishes in familiar forms, and a transactional conception of mission that emphasizes liturgical change to attract younger people. In addition to being theologically problematic, these ecclesiologies and missiologies are disconnected from the contextual realities of the Canadian religious landscape. However, openness to change and a desire for more emotionally energetic liturgy that is relevant to everyday life also have the potential to empower people in the pews to connect their liturgical lives with the Five Marks of Mission of the Anglican Communion and Transformational Aspirations of the Anglican Church of Canada.

Celebrity atheists are usually represented by the “four horsemen” who emerged in the new atheism movement. Atheist social media influencers, however, may challenge the simplified understandings of celebrity atheists. Drawing on fifty-four interviews with atheist, agnostic, and secular humanist SMIs on YouTube and TikTok, we have identified three platform imaginaries adopted by atheist SMIs. First, rather than thinking of a concrete audience, some atheist SMIs perceive social media platform as a space for self-expression. Second, perceiving their deconversions as lonely, some atheist SMIs sought to create space for others to know they were not alone. Finally, SMIs often eschewed the idea of creating content to make money and sometimes disagreed with the label SMI itself because of its association with selling products. We argue that atheist SMIs’ platform imaginary needs to be understood in the context of secularization and stigmatization, commodification and consumerism, and the debates over religious authority.

Today’s waning of traditional religion runs parallel with a waxing of popular interest in matters “spiritual.” While a growing body of qualitative research provides rich insights into the spiritual lives of the non-religious, we do not sufficiently understand the varieties and significance of spiritual experiences among the non-religious in the professional realm, particularly in domains like science. This paper reports findings from a study involving 100 qualitative interviews with non-religious physicists and biologists in various national contexts, designed to shed light on the categories, contexts, and consequences of spirituality among non-religious scientists. We find that non-religious scientists’ spiritual experiences fall into three distinct categories: aesthetic, immersive, and transcendent; which are occasioned by four types of contexts: nature, music or art, grief or loss, and science itself; and in turn can give rise to attitudinal changes requiring such cognitive accommodations as the selective suspension of disbelief and toleration of cognitive dissonance.

This paper explores the interweaving of politics, nature, and nonreligion in urban Sydney, Australia, responding to a call from sociologists to better understand ‘lived’ nonreligion, especially in the context of ‘world-repairing activities'. It reports on preliminary findings of an ethnographic project with urban community gardens and bush regeneration groups, and argues that social movements like environmentalism are rich sites for the study of lived nonreligion, as they offer their participants space for the cultivation, expression, and embodiment of ‘moral visions.’ The project focuses upon the relational and material dynamics of grassroots environmental groups in Sydney, and seeks to tease out the role of politics, enchantment, and nature in the creation of ethico-political subjectivities.

Augustine argues that the good Christian should make use of violence in the correction of the disobedient slave and in the case of Donatism violent religious coercion. However, Lactantius writing less than a century earlier in his work the Divine Institutes argues not only that religious coercion and slavery are unethical, but that these institutions of violence should not be part of Christianity specifically. I argue that the source of the disagreement lies not only in these authors’ different historical circumstances, although this certainly plays a significant role, but in how they categorize Christian identity. Lactantius depicts Christianity as a unity of philosophy and religion that existed independently of the institutions of the Roman empire, and thus as a means of which they could be corrected. However, Augustine depicts as a guiding institution of the Roman Empire which must make use of its institutions of violence such as slavery.

In Conf. 7.9, Augustine describes how Platonism gave him the ‘forma dei’ but not the ‘forma servi’, or ‘the form of the slave’. Recent commentators such as Matthew Ella (2020) have explored the way in which the ‘form-of-a-slave’ rule from Phil 2:5–11 deeply shaped Augustine’s Christology. This paper will explore  the connection between the pilgrimage motif and Augustine's use of the forma servi or slave imagery in order to undo or problematise any ultimate affirmation of slavery due to its subversive connection to the ideal pilgrim who humbly follows the order of God's love in the form of Jesus Christ.

Almost 1500 years after Augustine’s *Confessions*, Nat Turner, leader of the 1831 Southampton slave rebellion, dictated his own. These two texts represent vastly different forms of confession: a classic spiritual autobiography and an account of the rebellion haunted by the editorial presence of a white lawyer. Yet each confession found language in Scripture that made sense of their world and offered them a role to play in it. While increasing attention has been paid to Augustine’s writing on slavery, attention to how Scriptural narratives shape his sense of moral agency can contribute a further dimension to the discussion. Comparing his sense of Scripturally-narrated agency with that presented in Nat Turner’s *Confessions* highlights their accounts of moral agency and their divergent choices of biblical texts, language, and symbols. This paper will compare these two *Confessions* to discover how Scripture has been used to narrate human moral agency—its possibilities and limitations.